E3: Early Peeks at The Last of Us, Dead Space 3, SimCity 5

Jack Tretton, President and CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment of America, speaks on stage during the Sony Playstation press conference in Los Angeles on June 4, 2012 in California, where the entertainment giant introduced a line up of products for the world’s most innovative and powerful gaming platforms.

The Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) launched on Monday with press conferences held in downtown Los Angeles by major game companies like Microsoft, EA Games, Sony and Ubisoft. We’ve included a few interesting announcements on the eve of the main event.

Visceral Games kicked off the Electronic Arts press conference with Dead Space 3, the latest installment of their popular survival-horror game that will be released on February 2013. The new game seems to have traded some horror and moodiness for more necromorph dismemberment with drop-in, drop-out co-op play and a new steely character named Sergeant John Carver.

The game also ventures outside the usual space station interiors and onto an ice-covered planet where Isaac Clark and his new partner fight to survive the harsh climate and combat hoards of ice monsters and the growing necromorph threat.

Maxis’ senior vice president Lucy Bradshaw presented two trailers for SimCity 5, a PC game reboot of the popular urban planning franchise that now has an optional multiplayer mode as well as a more socially responsible and green bent. Not much about game play was revealed but the cityscapes in the trailer have a dreamy forced perspective that makes everything look toy-like. Bradshaw also announced that SimCity Social would be coming to Facebook to challenge Zynga’s “CityVille” which she indirectly referenced as one of many imitators over the past years.

Most of Sony’s press briefing at the Los Angeles Sports Arena focused on Playstation 3 games, notably Quantic Dream’s Beyond: Two Souls, starring “Juno’s” Ellen Page and “The Last of Us.” The latter PlayStation 3 exclusive by Naughty Dog is an apocalyptic role-playing game that follows Joel, a middle-aged man, and his teen-aged sidekick named Ellie as they wander through an overgrown world that’s been emptied by a pandemic. The gameplay trailer showed both protagonists climbing through the richly rendered ruins of a hotel where they encountered a group of armed hostiles foraging for supplies. The combat looked realistically brutal and included burning enemies with Molotov cocktails, a shotgun blast to the face and using furniture to bash skulls in real time.

According to Sony CEO Jack Tretton, sixty new games will arrive for the PlayStation Vita in 2012 including Call of Duty: Black Ops Unclassified and Assassin’s Creed. The former will have “seamless online connectivity” and may soon feature a multiplayer mode and the latter features a female protagonist. Hulu Plus and Crackle apps will also be arriving soon.

On the more PG rated side, Sony introduced a new product called Wonderbook that uses their Move controller and Playstation Eye digital camera to create interactive, augmented reality books. The first book planned is entitled “Book of Spells” and is a collaboration between PlayStation and Harry Potter series creator JK Rowling who writes new stories for the game. Essentially, players use the Move controller as a magic wand and learn to cast spells.

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